Do you want your team to achieve better results, or do you want your team to live better lives?

Making the decision to become a highly effective leader, and making the decision to become a leadership resource for the leaders within your organisation tells me a lot about you. This is a huge responsibility to take on, and requires a person with a very strong character.

You will already have your team members following you because they want to, and you have achieved that by building strong relationships with them, and helping them to develop their character.

So, in order for the leaders to follow you because they want to, you need to build strong relationships with them, and help them develop their character too.

Highly effective leaders do not use their title or position to gain power over people, instead they use them as a leverage to help them develop and grow their people, and beyond.

Highly effective leaders will purposely follow aspiring leaders, or leaders who are willing to improve, so that they can help them develop.

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With a highly effective leader follows you because they want to, it really does give you the confidence to lead others. You will know this because a highly effective leader is trustworthy, they are authentic, they are transparent, and they have very good intentions.

1. Your Commitment

How committed are you to becoming a highly effective leader? It is not easy at all, in fact it is very uncomfortable, and you will be out of your comfort zone a lot of the time.

I have talked about being comfortable with being uncomfortable in my other resources, and to be a highly effective leader, you really do need to get comfortable with being uncomfortable.

That is how you are growing. If you are not uncomfortable, then you are not growing, you are static. The more you become comfortable with being uncomfortable, the more your confidence to lead others will increase.

To be able to lead others, and help them raise their leadership level, you must first raise your own leadership level.

As a highly effective leader, we work on ourselves every day to keep raising our leadership level, it is a commitment we make and we honour. Are you willing to make that commitment? I hope you are.

As people start learning about highly effective leadership, and what it means to be a highly effective leader, they tend to look outwards at other leaders.

They do this and judge what they are learning on leadership against the leaders that they work with, or their senior leaders, and even the leaders of the organisation they work with.

People very rarely look inwards at themselves and judge themselves against what they are learning. Highly effective leaders judge themselves, they do not judge others. You should do the same.

However, even though I am advising you to look inwards, judge yourself against what you are learning, and only be in competition with yourself, it is human nature to look outwards at other leaders. You will do it, and I will do it. It’s just how people are.

2. The Importance Of Our Behaviour

So, if that is the case, with our people constantly looking at us and judging us, we must ensure that what they see is actually what we are teaching them. If we are behaving in a certain way as a leader, but we are teaching our people something different, then we will come across inauthentic, and untrustworthy.

With a lack of trust from our people, we will lose all of our credibility. It is impossible to become a highly effective leader without credibility or trust.

When you are teaching your people leadership, you are teaching them a way to live, not a theory, or a problem that needs to be solved. We cannot teach people a way to live, and then live a completely different way to what we teach. We must practice what we preach.

We must believe in what we teach, and be passionate about what we teach. How you live is what you will be judged on, not what you teach.

When I began teaching leadership, and striving to become a highly effective leader, I needed to make some changes within myself first. I needed to lead by example, and lead myself first before I could lead others. If I said I was going to do something to help another person, then I followed through and did it.

Previously, I had the tendency to let others down. So, that was a huge thing that I needed to change in myself. There were a few other things too. You may want to make similar changes in your life so that you can live what you teach. I will be able to help you with this through my other articles and materials.

You will be teaching people how to build their character, and build relationships with others in order to increase their influence and strive to become a highly effective leader.

3. Building Character

So, you must do no less. In fact, you must do more if you want to set that example for your leaders. I don’t mean you have to live a perfect life. But, you must certainly be working hard every day to live the same way you are teaching others to live.

As you are teaching your people to work on and strengthen their character, you will begin to see weaknesses in their character that you can help them with. What you must not let happen is, your people seeing weaknesses in your character. That will also lose your credibility.

4. Being A Role Model For Your People

As you lead your people by example, you are showing them what highly effective leadership looks like in real life. You are not just teaching the theory of it. As your people see what highly effective leadership looks like, they will have a model that they can follow.

As they begin to model your behaviour, they will start to feel different, people will start behaving differently around them, and they will start to be treated differently.

Your example will set a clear direction for your people to go, and they will know that following your lead, will enable them to be the role model for others in the same way.

As the leader teaching others through the resources you create, you will be giving your people something in common. You will be giving them a way to live and behave both in their personal and professional lives. They will then be able to pass on this commonality to their people.

The commonality being you. It is your character that enables you to behave like a highly effective leader. It is your behaviour that your people will see. It is what your people see that will either attract them to you or not.

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Make your behaviour attractive to your people, so that they will want to model that behaviour. Give your people your vision that they can make their own, and believe what you believe.

We must never just expect our team and our people to just know how to behave. It is a low performing leader who thinks this way. That is how they get out of the responsibility of leading by example.

If the team do not have a vision to strive towards, believe what you believe, and a model of how to behave, then your team are not going to model highly effective leadership.

Highly effective leaders accept the responsibility of highly effective leadership. The responsibility of highly effective leadership is to create an environment for their people that will allow them to learn, grow, develop, and follow a role model. What kind of environment are you going to create?

If people follow leaders because they have to, then there is no freedom to choose. If people follow leaders because they want to, then there is freedom to choose. Are you going to allow your people the freedom to choose?

I welcome hearing how this post has influenced the way you think, the way you lead, or the results you have achieved because of what you’ve learned in it. Please feel free to share your thoughts with me by commenting below.